Crosscurrent

by Paul Kemp

  They hurried across the bay, their boots beating staccato on the metal floor, until they stood before the cargo door. Marr put his finger on the red button that would lower the door and looked to Relin. He could see that the Jedi was not well. Sweat glistened on his pale skin, pasting his black hair to his scalp. His breathing was labored, pained, like that of a wounded animal. His deep-sunken eyes looked clear, though, lit by some inner resolve, and that heartened Marr.

  “Ready?” Marr asked.

  Relin inhaled and bounced on the balls of his feet, staring at the cargo bay door as if he could burn holes into it with his eyes. He ignited his lightsaber, the green blade humming in the quiet of the bay.

  “Open it.”

  Marr hit the button and the bay door started to descend. The wail of Harbinger’s alarm carried through the opening.

  “Five minutes and go,” Relin said without looking at Marr.

  Before the door got halfway down, blasterfire from the freight corridor sizzled into the bulkheads, scorching the metal. Marr threw himself against the wall, out of the line of fire. Relin did not so much as move while the door continued its trek. More blasterfire poured through the opening. Relin deflected two shots with his lightsaber, almost casually sending the bolts into Junker’s bulkheads.

  Looking straight ahead, Relin started to speak, stopped, then started again, his lips barely moving.

  “May the Force be with you, Marr.”

  Marr heard sadness in Relin’s words, saw tears pooling in the Jedi’s eyes.

  “Relin …,” Marr began, but before he could say more the bay door opened fully and Relin bounded out into a hail of blasterfire, the glowing line of his lightsaber transformed into a figure-eight by the speed of his defense. He roared like a rancor as he sped down the corridor.

  Blasterfire forced Marr back against the wall and he lost line of sight to the corridor. He heard Relin’s shouts answered by throaty growls, heard enough blasterfire to know that Relin was facing a large number of enemies. Blasts carried through the cargo bay and blackened the storage containers.

  A lull in the fire allowed Marr a moment to peek out and down the corridor.

  A pair of bodies—large, red-skinned humanoids in black uniforms—lay in a pool of blood eight meters down the corridor, both decapitated. One of the heads faced Marr, yellow eyes still open, a fleshy beard of finger-length appendages partially concealing a fanged mouth. Marr had never seen such creatures before.

  Relin sheltered in a crouch in one of the many doorways that lined the hall, maybe fifteen meters from Junker’s gangway. More of the red-skinned humanoids, all of them armed with large blaster pistols, crouched at intervals in the other doorways and alcoves that dotted the length of the corridor. Two more sheltered in the middle of the hall behind a treaded droid, which beeped plaintively at its predicament. Marr assumed the creatures to be some kind of security detail. He counted fourteen of them.

  The smoky air carried the acrid tang of blaster discharge and scorched metal. Harbinger’s alarm contined to scream.

  The creatures shouted at one another in deep, gravelly voices, though Marr did not understand the language. Now and again, one of them fired a blaster shot in Relin’s vicinity, but none made as though to advance. They appeared content to keep Relin pinned down. Probably they had already called for reinforcements.

  Relin crouched with his back to the wall, facing Marr, favoring his cracked ribs. Anger twisted his expression so much he could have been another man altogether. His eyes looked like holes. The light from his lightsaber cast his pale skin in green.

  He must have felt Marr’s eyes on him. He looked up and made an angry gesture with his stump, ordering Marr to seal Junker.

  When Marr made no move to comply, Relin snarled and leapt out of the doorway, moving so fast he looked blurred. His lightsaber weaved an oblong shield of light around him. The security detail opened up in full and blaster shots filled the corridor. Relin spun like a top, deflecting the shots with rapidity but no control. Blasts slammed into the ceiling, into overhead lights, sending a rain of glass to the floor, into the cargo bay, close enough to Marr’s face that he felt the heat of its passage.

  Relin closed on the nearest pair of the red-skinned humanoids, gesturing with his stump as he neared them. The creatures’ blasters flew from their hands and they backed off a step, eyes wide, fumbling with the huge metal polearms on their backs.

  Before they could bring them to bear, Relin redirected the blasterfire from their fellows at them and blew holes in both their chests, spattering the bulkheads with their black blood.

  Relin ducked into the alcove where the two dead creatures had sheltered, using their corpses as partial cover. Marr saw him in profile, the pained grimace on his face, the angry set of his jaw. A blaster had winged his arm with the severed hand, though it appeared a minor wound. Scorch marks ringed the frayed holes in Relin’s robes and shirt.

  Blasterfire pinned him to the wall.

  He was moving too slowly, Marr knew. He should already have been gone. They had not expected so much resistance right away. Harbinger’s crew knew where he was, where Junker was, and more and more of them would marshal here to stop him. Relin looked back at Marr and again gestured angrily for him to seal the ship.

  “Close it!” Relin shouted.

  Blasterfire forced him to press himself against the wall.

  From outside in the landing bay, something heavy thumped against Junker and the high-pitched whine of some kind of motor carried through the bulkheads. Marr knew the crew in the landing bay would soon either try to cut their way in or simply blow the ship from the deck. He had little time. If they got into Junker, he’d never leave Harbinger.

  He reached for the button that would close the cargo bay door, let his hand hover over it, and … stopped.

  He remembered the greasy touch of the Lignan on his spirit, its coldness, its sharpness. He did not fully understand its danger, but he knew Relin’s warnings about what the Sith could do with it were true. Relin could not be allowed to fail. He lowered his hand and met Relin’s gaze.

  Perhaps Relin saw Marr’s resolve.

  “No!” Relin shouted. “Go, Marr! Go!”

  Marr nodded, but not at Relin.

  “I am the keep,” he said to himself.

  * * *

  Pulses of blasterfire slammed into the bulkheads near Relin, turning the metal black and warm. Anger, frustration, and pain warred for predominance in Relin. Every breath made his side feel as if he were being stabbed. He was moving far too slowly, he knew. More Massassi would be coming. Saes would be coming. He had underestimated their ability to respond.

  A shout of rage crept up his throat, but he held it in, pulled it close, used it to focus his mind. The Force flowed strongly through him, but he was unable to use it to reduce his fatigue or replenish his spirit or body. His power, heightened by the Lignan, answered only to his anger, only to his hate. With it, he could only destroy and kill, not heal.

  He knew what that meant but no longer cared.

  He had left what he once was five thousand years in the past. Now he was something different, someone else. He wanted only to destroy and kill, to avenge Drev’s death, to redeem the two great failures of his life in a conflagration of fire and blood. His grief had metamorphosed into hate, and the change pleased him.

  But first he needed to get out of the corridor and deeper into the ship. He’d inhaled as best he could and readied himself to move when a roar from Junker’s cargo bay drowned out the sound of blasterfire. For a moment he could not place the origin of the sound, but then it occurred to him—it was an engine.

  Flotsam set down twenty meters from the large central structure. The craft’s landing threw up a cloud of snow. Jaden unstrapped himself from his seat. Khedryn did the same.

  “You needn’t come, Khedryn.”

  Khedryn smiled, his floating eye staring out the cockpit viewport, his other on Jaden’s face.

  “That’s as true a
statement as you’ve uttered, Jedi. But I think I’ll come along anyway.” He winked his lazy eye. “There might be something here worth salvaging.”

  Jaden smiled, grateful for the companionship. “Let’s gear up, then.”

  Both donned environment suits, sealed the helmets, tested the comlinks, and opened the starboard side exit.

  The frozen air and snow of an icy world blew in and dusted the floor at their feet. The enviro-suits blunted the force of the cold, but Jaden’s skin still goose-pimpled. He stood at the top of the ramp, staring out at the drifts and the swirling snow.

  Khedryn’s voice sounded in his helmet. “Jaden? Let’s move. Even with the suits we don’t want to be out in this any longer than necessary.”

  But Jaden needed to feel the air, taste it. He deactivated the seal on his helmet, and it disconnected with a slight hiss.

  Khedryn took him by the arm. “What are you doing?”

  “I need to do this, Khedryn.”

  “Why?”

  Jaden did not answer, but Khedryn let him go, muttering about eyes and cursing randomly.

  Jaden lifted off the helmet and gasped at the smell of the air, the cut of the wind against his skin. He was living his Force vision, the imagined and the real melding into one in the frozen air of the moon.

  He inhaled. The air felt like fire in his throat and he imagined himself purged by the pain. Moisture from his breath formed clouds in the air before him, collected in his beard, froze there. The wind hissed past his ears. In the distance, he heard the crack of ice.

  All of it as it had been in his vision.

  He knelt, removed a glove, and took a handful of snow from the deck, letting it melt in his hand. He looked out through the swirl and saw the red light of the communications tower looming over the rest of the complex, blinking at him through the snow.

  Help us. Help us.

  He would.

  Standing, he slid his glove back over his freezing hand, resealed his helmet, then activated his lightsaber. The heat it threw off warmed him.

  “Follow me,” he said to Khedryn.

  Khedryn drew his blaster and followed him toward the facility. “I am increasingly concerned that all Jedi are crazed.”

  Jaden smiled but otherwise left the comment alone. Khedryn tapped a control pad on his suit’s forearm and remotely closed and secured the Starhawk.

  The deep snow clutched at their feet, as if trying to slow their advance and give them time to reconsider. Jaden looked up, eyed the slate of the sky, imagined not snow falling but reified evil.

  “Do you think they’re all right?” Khedryn said over the comlink, apparently misunderstanding his look. “Would you know if … something happened?”

  “The Force is with them,” Jaden said.

  “You said that before, but it’s not an answer.”

  “I do not have many of those.”

  The facility looked to Jaden not like an ordinary building, but like a tomb that held an enormous evil better left alone. He was unsure that he should dig it up, yet he felt he had no choice. He faltered in his steps.

  Khedryn stepped to his side. “Come on, Jaden. Keep moving. There is a hatch ahead.”

  Jaden continued on, walking beside a skew-eyed salvager on a moon not found on any star charts.

  “Hey, was I in your vision?” Khedryn asked him.

  “No.”

  “That’s not reassuring,” Khedryn said, and chuckled.

  Jaden laughed, too, glad once more for Khedryn’s presence.

  They neared the hatch, and Jaden was certain that whatever fate the Force had for him lurked behind it.

  Marr held a blaster in one hand and with his other the steering bars of Khedryn’s Searing swoop. The swoop’s motor was so loud it sounded like an ongoing explosion.

  Marr’s heart beat so fast he could hardly breathe. Recalling Relin’s words, he turned inward, focused his mind on the keep within him, thought of how he felt when immersed in a difficult calculation, a distant, warm isolation that brought him calm.

  His heart and breathing slowed, replaced by a pleasing serenity.

  Centered, resolved, he revved the swoop’s engine and bolted out of the cargo bay into the corridor, firing his blaster as fast as he could pull the trigger, hoping the Force would guide some of his shots.

  Blasterfire from Harbinger’s security forces answered his own, sizzled past his ears, and thumped into the swoop. It bucked under him like an angry bantha, but he held his seat. He picked a spot in the hall—where the two humanoids sheltered behind the loading droid—ducked low behind the windscreen and, still firing his blaster wildly, flew right at them.

  Jaden expected to find the hatch rusted shut, or protected by a security system. Instead they found it propped open a few centimeters. Khedryn and he stared at the hatch for a long moment, the wind howling past their helmets.

  “What do you make of that?” Khedryn asked, nodding at the item holding the door open.

  Jaden knelt and picked it up—the back hand plate from a suit of Imperial stormtrooper armor.

  “Is that from a stormie suit?”

  Jaden nodded, turning the plastoid plate over in his hand. “It is. Odd.”

  “Probably been there for decades,” Khedryn said, but he did not sound as if he believed it. He looked over his shoulder as if he expected a squad of the 501st to come charging out of the snow.

  “Probably,” Jaden agreed. On edge, he pulled the heavy metal door open the rest of the way. It opened onto a small foyer. A transparisteel observation window on an inner wall opened onto a guard station. Another hatch, thrown open, revealed a hallway that led deeper into the facility. Over the hatch, written in Basic in stenciled letters, were the words:

  WEST ENTRY. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

  Jaden reached out with the Force, seeking any Force-sensitives within range, but felt none.

  “Follow me,” he said, leading Khedryn past the post and through the hatch, his lightsaber a torch in the otherwise dark corridor. Khedryn activated a glow rod and added its light to the weapon’s glow.

  Walking those metal-floored, abandoned halls, Jaden felt as if he had stepped into the past as surely as Relin had stepped into the future.

  “Ten degrees Celsius,” Khedryn said, taking the information from his suit readout. He unsealed his helmet, letting it hang from its connectors down his back. “Someone is keeping the place warm.”

  Jaden unsealed his own helmet, his breath steaming in the air. They walked on, their feet moving through the detritus of a rapid retreat: scrap electronics; flimsiplast, the ink long faded; stray data crystals; oddly, a hairbrush.

  Khedryn cleared his throat, a nervous sound. “What do you suppose happened here?”

  Jaden shook his head.

  They moved through hall after hall, room after room, and everywhere it was the same—debris littered the floor in the silent, cool air. They found nothing to indicate the facility’s purpose.

  In time they came to a series of small, sparely furnished personal quarters where clothing still hung in closets, where beds remained unmade. The whole facility felt to Jaden like a doll’s house in which a child had lost interest and just left off in midplay.

  He examined the clothing and shoes in the closets. In addition to ordinary clothing, he found a neatly pressed Imperial uniform and several lab coats. The label sewn onto the coat’s breast read DR. BLACK.

  “Thrawn-era uniform,” Jaden said, noting the cut of the cuffs, the rank insignia. “Imperial Medical Corps.”

  “Medical corps?” Khedryn said, his breathing a bit too rapid. “A bioweapons research lab, you think? I did not think to scan for an aerosolized bioweapon.”

  “You had no reason to,” Jaden said. “And what’s done is done. If there were something in the air, we’d be suffering effects already. I feel fine. You?”

  “Fine.”

  “Then I think we’re all right.”

  “Maybe we should put our helmets back on.”
<
br />   “We’re all right.”

  Khedryn seemed to accept that, and the two of them searched the chest of drawers, the side table. Jaden felt awkward pawing through another’s personal effects, but saw no other choice. He rifled through toiletries, a reading light, a gift set of novels on data crystals inset into an elaborate box. Eventually Khedryn pulled a personal vidlog from the back of one of the drawers.

  “Here,” he said in an excited tone. He tapped at the buttons, soft at first, then harder. “Not functional. With some time Marr could probably recover the data.”

  “Leave it,” Jaden said. He started to move on when something struck him and halted him in his steps. He looked around the room to confirm his thought, then spoke it aloud.

  “There are no pictures.”

  “No what?”

  “No pictures, no holograms, no vids. Of friends, family. Look around.”

  Khedryn turned a circle, his eyes askew. “You’re right. Maybe they took them with them?”

  “Maybe,” Jaden said, but thought not. They seemed to have left in a hurry, abandoning all manner of personal effects. They would have left at least some pictures or holograms.

  “Let’s keep moving,” Jaden said.

  They soon came upon a recreation room where two card games and a match of sonic billiards appeared to have ended abruptly. Khedryn examined the cards at one of the tables.

  “Sabacc,” he said, and flipped over the cards for all but one of the hands. “Cheap deck and not a good hand among them. Unlucky bunch.” He seemed to hear his words only after he said them and colored at their implication. “At cards, I mean.”

  A galley off the recreation room still had sludgy caf in two of the pots, stores of dry goods, fresh food long rotted. Jaden eyed the walls and saw a large square speaker beside one of the air filtration vents. He imagined an alert blaring out of it, everyone leaving what they were doing to respond, but ultimately fleeing the facility in a hurry.

  Assuming they had gotten out. He was no longer so sure.

  “What is this place?” Khedryn said, his outstretched arms taking in the whole of the complex. “Have you noticed that there’s nothing to indicate what it is? Nothing. But Imperials used to put labels on everything. Normally the hallway walls would be crowded with written directions and arrows pointing to weapons lab this, research area that. This place is secret even from itself.”